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PLoS ONE received its 2010 journal impact factor today, 4.411, placing the open access journal in 12th spot among 85 Biology journals.
The open access journal, published by the Public Library of Science, has grown rapidly since its launch in December 2006. In 2010, it published nearly 7,000 articles and became the largest scientific journal in the world. Based on this trajectory, the publisher predicts 12,000 published articles by the end of 2011.
PLoS ONE is based on a scalable publishing model with an editorial board of 1,300 volunteer academics. As an online-only publication, the growth of the journal is nearly limitless — the journal is purposefully interdisciplinary in nature, bases criteria for inclusion primarily on “sound methodology,” not novelty, and pays for itself through individual article fees. At the 2011 SSP Annual Conference, PLoS ONE publisher, Peter Binfield, believes that we’ve entered the era of the “OA Mega Journal.” According to his predictions, by 2016, 50% of all STM articles will be published by 100 of these mega journals.
The metaphor to describe this new publishing model could go both ways: for the cynical, PLoS ONE is an alien Blob that is bent on devouring the publishing landscape; for its supporters, it represents a successful model to be emulated — and emulated it has been. In the last two years, many subscription publishers have launched PLoS ONE-like journals (SAGE Open, BMJ Open, Biology Open, and Open Biology, to name a few) into the growing market, promising similar services — fast publication, a high likelihood of acceptance, and article-level metrics after publication — at competing prices.
Expect several more entrants this year.
At the recent SSP Conference, I met several publishers who were poised to launch their own open access journals after discovering that the majority of their rejected manuscripts were being published by PLoS ONE. “Why invest so much into editorial and peer-review if all of that work was benefiting a competitor?” they reasoned.
Yesterday, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society, and the Wellcome Trust announced plans to launch their own open access journal by summer 2012.
Does this change of heart — from a stalwart adherence to a model of scientific publishing that values selection, to a model that values dissemination — indicate that the venerable establishment of scientific publishing is making a fast turnabout? Or, is there more information in the Journal Citation Report data that reveals a citation bubble that is about to collapse and, along with it, the hopes of many authors?
As I argued last year around this time, a respectable impact factor for PLoS ONE is both a blessing and a curse. While the PLoS establishment may be dismissive of impact factors — and any indicator that attempts to derive article-level value from journal-level metrics — most authors consider a journal’s impact factor seriously when deciding where to publish. And open access supporters are no different from the status quo, according a recent survey. The impact factor is still a major component of individual, departmental, and organizational evaluation around the world; and in places like China, authors are compensated financially for their success in publishing in high-impact journals.
Given the choice of submitting to a highly-selective, rigorously-reviewed, and a meticulously copy-edited specialist journal with a commensurate impact factor, the benefits of PLoS ONE are quite apparent, if not as a first-choice for initial submission, then as a second alternative when one’s manuscript is rejected.
In this light, the massive growth in publication output from PLoS ONE may be interpreted not as a sign of success, but as a market that has been established to profit on failure.
Now, before you jump to the comment section and take me to task for this dramatically critical statement of an immensely successful journal, let’s consider the data in more detail.
As described in detail in a prior post, the most recent 2010 journal impact factor reflects the collective success of articles published by early adopters in 2008 and 2009 — years in which there was no PLoS ONE impact factor.
PLoS ONE Publications (Binfield, SSP 2011)
If last year’s announcement of an impact factor changed the behavior of submitting authors — and the spike in article publications beginning in the last quarter of 2010 suggests this is the case (see slide 13 of Binfield’s talk) — we should start seeing the manifestation of this behavioral shift in the 2011 Journal Citation Reports, which will be published in June 2012.
If you cannot wait that long, a foreshadowing of this prediction may be found in this year’s JCR data.
The Journal Immediacy Index (JII) represents the average number of citations received by articles published in the most current year — in other words, citations made in 2010 to articles published in 2010. While most articles take much longer to accrue citations, early citations are often a reliable indicator of long-term citation success, especially in the biomedical sciences. And for large journals that publish thousands of articles, like PLoS ONE, the JII should be pretty stable. In 2010, the PLoS ONE immediacy index was 0.515, representing a drop of about 12% from 2009 (0.582).
If the Journal Immediacy Index for PLoS ONE is any indication of its future impact factor, then we should expect the next two reports to show significant declines in the citation impact of this journal as the articles published by late adopters begin to displace those from the early adopters. Unlike the US housing market bubble that popped within a matter of weeks, the PLoS ONE citation bubble will slowly deflate over a period of two years or more.
For specialized journals, who have established themselves on providing rigorous review and meticulous layout and editing, this deflation may come too late. The OA Mega Journal has arrived and is here to stay.
Earlier today Heather Morrisson posted a comment on liblicense citing this article where complaints about the increasing cost of peer review were voiced: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=414106. I replied, in part:
PLoS One seems to be a major case in point. Even granting that the review is “light,” the huge number of articles published still carries a substantial cost in peer reviewing. I have also wondered about the incentives that drive OA publishers like Hindawi. Clearly, as submissions increase, on the OA model the best way to cover increasing costs for processing submissions is to increase the rate of acceptance, which brings in more money in fees to cover the costs. Even after the enormous increase in article production we’ve witnessed throughout the whole “serials crisis” period, it appears that the incentives in place now will drive an even greater expansion in the future, thus adding further to the problem of separating the wheat from the chaff.
Posted by Sandy Thatcher | Jun 28, 2011, 3:26 pm“a market that has been established to profit on failure.” – would this not also describe the low/no-impact journals that round out the stables of most “traditional” publishers?
Posted by Andy Farke | Jun 28, 2011, 6:31 pmSort of. It really depends on the journal. There are indeed, bottom-feeding journals as you suggest. But there are also many journals that cover niche fields that offer high quality papers that are in a field so small or obscure that it can’t perform well in terms of drawing outside citations to improve the impact factor.
I’m sure we could both name some journals that fit the mold you’re describing but one can’t put all low/no impact journals into that one bucket.
Posted by David Crotty | Jun 28, 2011, 9:02 pmPhil – regarding your comment about the Journal Immediacy Index, I think you may have made a false assumption. You can only directly compare one year with another if you are talking about a journal which is growing at the same rate throughout both years (or preferably remaining flat through the period).
For example, if a journal publishes a higher proportion of its papers in the final quarter of the year (when you would reasonably expect no same-year citations to have a chance to occur) then, assuming the quality of the content remains constant, it would automatically have a lower Immediacy Index than the prior year.
For PLoS ONE – in Q4 of 2009 the journal published approx 29% of the volume for the whole of that year (1,262 articles out of 4,404). However, in Q4 of 2010, the journal published approx 33% of the total annual output for the year (2,205 articles out of 6,784). The difference is an increase of approx 14% (from 29% to 33%).
Posted by Peter Binfield | Jun 28, 2011, 7:37 pmYes, you may be right! I’m still betting on a deflation of your impact factor for next year however. If I’m wrong, I owe you a beer
Posted by Phil Davis | Jun 28, 2011, 9:16 pmI think it’s very unlikely that the PLoS ONE impact factor will inflate or deflate in the near future. Simply, the denominator is too large, so it acts as a buffer that resists intense changes. I have been following ISI citations to PLoS ONE for a while, and it seems there is constant ratio of 3.6 ISI WoS citations per article. How did it become 4.4? I have always been amazed that the IF never matches WoS citations; I guess they use some additional non WoS-listed journals, so the citations are always higher than WoS but lower than WoK
Posted by Ramy Karam Aziz (@azizrk) | Aug 26, 2011, 5:53 pmOpen Access certainly has its merits, but it is not a model that should be emulated by all publishers. I’m the journal manager for The Canadian Field-Naturalist, which is a non-profit journal that has been publishing research related to Canadian wildlife since 1879. Our journal is rare in that many of our authors are amateur researchers – something of which we are proud.
Over the past year we have made many changes to our journal, and we considered during our overhaul whether or not to go open access. We researched open access options and decided against it. Open Access requires payment from authors. Because amateur authors do not have grants to cover author charges, they’d have to pay out of their own pockets. Because many of our subscribers want (in fact insist upon) print subscriptions, we cannot go exclusively online and our costs are therefore considerable. If we went Open Access we’d either price amateur authors out of the market (which would be a huge disservice to science), or else price professional authors out of the market if we waived amateurs’ charges and hiked up professional authors’ charges to compensate.
Open Access has merits, but it is not the miracle publishing model some make it out to be. For our journal it would not be a good model.
Posted by Jay Fitzsimmons | Jun 28, 2011, 10:31 pmOpen Access requires payment from authors. Because amateur authors do not have grants to cover author charges, they’d have to pay out of their own pockets.
Yet scholars in the social sciences and humanities are able to publish without author charges, even online (e.g. Sexual Offender Treatment, to pick a journal at random). It’s true that most of these are associated with a society or organization, but the difference in business models seems to me to be extreme.
Posted by Doctor Science | Jul 21, 2011, 12:12 pmThanks for an interesting article, and it supports a discussion I had with a journal editor this time last year – he was trying to get me to lay a bet that PLoS ONE was a bubble where the “second choice” publications that you mention would eventually lead to its demise. I disagreed then, and still do to a certain extent (I’m also too mean to lay out good money on predictions!).
PLoS ONE started with a fantastic brand and a clever model (along with some nice bells-and-whistles), and it provides a great “one-stop-shop” for researchers (something other large publishers have the potential to offer across their journals but somehow miss out on). However whether it will replace the high-impact, high-quality journals, I’m not so sure: will the pre-selected quality assurance and relevance selection that they offer retain their place in the eyes (and hearts) of researchers? (i.e. their role to cut through information overload and identify “what the good stuff is”).
Will PLoS ONE replace the second-tier journals? More possibly – and the “superjournal” may well be a better model for articles not quite good enough for the top tier (to trim the cost of endless reviews etc.).
There is, however, another factor to take into account – the crowd. It is quite possible that PLoS ONE will become self-fulfilling: the higher the IF, the more cites/submits = the higher the IF = the more success for PLoS ONE = the worse for other journals.
But I’m still not willing to bet either way!
Posted by pippa smart | Jun 29, 2011, 4:00 amIn reading this post and the comments, it struck me that an author of a journal article getting published in PLoS ONE is sounding more and more like the author of a book getting her book into Amazon. Talk about a one-stop-shop that’s relatively easy to get into! Even if the book author can’t find a publisher (or doesn’t want to), she can self-publish (author-pays) and her book is where more people buy more books than anyplace else. (I see that as a good thing, btw, and I suspect SK’s head chef and chief mystery author would agree.) The critical difference: books aren’t available in just one place, whereas the dynamic in journal publishing is binary: if your article doesn’t get into the top-tier specialized journal ( = Farrar, Straus didn’t buy my novel), you’ve got a good chance of getting it into PLoS ONE (assuming it passes their apparently somewhat relaxed peer review, i.e. novelty isn’t so much a consideration). But if your novel _is_ published by Farrar, Straus, it’s still in Amazon (plus a bunch of other places). Does anybody see journal publishing moving toward this multiple-outlet model, where there are mega journals where you can find pretty much everything, but some things have the imprimatur, and the refinement, and the marketing, offered by the higher-tier publisher? I realize that’s a radical wrench to the current model. But it strikes me that we might be moving in that direction. Just a thought from a mostly book-side guy.
Posted by Bill Kasdorf | Jun 29, 2011, 10:34 amThe way I see it, PLoS ONE is not about replacing a specific journal, it’s about replacing the whole scholarly publishing industry. As such, article quality/impact will naturally vary in the same way that article quality currently varies across the full spectrum of scholarly journals today. The PLoS ONE impact factor will probably asymptote to the industry profile, not specific journals.
Posted by Richard Wynne | Jun 29, 2011, 1:00 pmPLoS ONE has opened a new area in publishing industry as well as scientific community. It will save huge amounts of brain mind to pursuing real science rather than spending so much efforts just to publish data in a top-tier journal wothout increasing anymore significance of the publication. I have always submitted manuscripts to PLoS ONE without wasting time in top-tier journals.
PLoS ONE is also well distributed to audience than any specialized journals.
Posted by JX | Jun 29, 2011, 8:10 pm“bases criteria for inclusion primarily on “sound methodology,” not novelty, and pays for itself through individual article fees”.
It should indicated that PLOS ONE has published much more novelty than Nature, Cell and Science each year. The novelty means primary findings. Nature, Cell and Science have suppressed a lot of primary findings.
Posted by JX | Jul 14, 2011, 4:15 pmHasn’t Applied Physics Letters been doing a review process similar to this for a few decades now? They don’t handle the volume of PLoS ONE, only 4459 articles in 2010 according to Journal Citation Reports, but peer review, rapid dissemination, lack of subjective criteria seem to be in place. Am I missing something?
Posted by Robin Sinn | Jul 15, 2011, 3:57 pmWe’ve published in PLos ONE and the review process was as rigorous as in well-known neuroscience journals we had published in previously. I was impressed.
Posted by koi | Jul 20, 2011, 10:44 amThe problem with ‘high-end’ journals like Nature and Science is that they are not journals, but magazines. They are only interested in ‘catchy-science’ and in many cases the actual science is very poor and would not survive peer-review in ‘lesser’ journals. They simply publish some articles because it sounds good and will sell magazines. Then later, the retractions and counter articles are published. for which scientific journal would be embarrassed, but these magazines are clearly not (they already sold their quota of the original). How Nature and Science ever got the reputation they did, it has long been lost with their model of science for profit, rather than dissemination of quality work. It is my hope that researchers will begin to realize what these magazines are, and instead publish in reputable journals and also avoid citing articles published in Nature and Science magazines.
Posted by Major John | Jul 28, 2011, 12:22 pmI take exception to the comments that the reviews at Plosone are light and will like to hear from other authors. My experience 3 papers published in PlosOne) has been of rigorous review. The only thing that differentiates Plosone is that the papers are not rejected based on novelty ( a term I have not understood, since majority of papers in other journals are reviewed by two reviewers)
Posted by plosone fan | Aug 9, 2011, 3:18 pmCompletely agree with you. Never understood novelty!!! have seen a lot of cases where one reviewer accepts it and the other reviewer has issues with novelty and the editor sides with the other reviewer.
Posted by anotherfan | Aug 11, 2011, 12:41 amThe claim that the peer-review process for PLoS ONE is somehow less stringent than for ‘traditional’ journals is claimed, taken as a given, but not backed up by any evidence. Mr. Davis gets a ‘Resubmit with Major Revision’ on this one.
I would argue that PLoS ONE’s review process is well in line with their well-deserved impact factor. To be sure, the online, open-source format allows for publication of a greater number of articles. But this simply means that research worthy of publication, that should enter the public realm, but may otherwise not make the cut under fierce competition for limited space in specialized journals gets published. If our concern is the advancement of science, this is a good thing.
Authors working their way down the impact factor scale is simply a case of aiming as high as one can. If The Lancet accepts my paper after Nature has rejected it, it is not because The Lancet somehow fudges peer review for commercial gain. If PLoS ONE takes it after The Lancet has rejected it, the same applies. And so on…
Disclaimer: I have both published in and served as a peer-reviewer for PLoS ONE
Posted by Emre | Dec 28, 2011, 8:31 amMy counter claim would be that it is quite possible to write a paper that is methodologically sound and at the same time totally uninteresting and unimportant and makes no significant contribution to the literature whatsoever.
Posted by Sandy Thatcher | Dec 28, 2011, 10:11 amCompletely agree! Simply, PLoS One reaches out to a much larger group of scientists and is becoming increasingly attractive to interdisciplinary scientists. The approach that Nature and Science takes is too narrow minded, depening on non-academics to make editorial decisions and know what is “interesting” for the public. PLoS One is now my first choice submission, especially with its short turnaround time for reviews.
Posted by RF | Dec 29, 2011, 9:01 pmI have published a few (both last- and middle-) author papers in PLoS One and was quite impressed with the level and professionalism of peer-review. The first paper we published there in 2009 has been cited at the rate of 10 references / year, which I found to be a fair rate for a pretty small field. I also fail to understand the exact meaning of “lack of general significance” argument that is often used by the editors refusing to send a paper for peer review. Often when we published such a paper in a specialized (and, low impact factor) journal it was collecting more citations than another Nature or Science paper. I mean, “lack of general interest” and “publishing in a low impact journal” does not indicate sloppy or uninteresting science.
Posted by AS | Jan 19, 2012, 12:51 pm